Bruce McLaren honoured with new statue | Motorsport - Car News Jun 2020

12:16 Wednesday 03 Jun 2020

Commemorations to mark half-a-century since the untimely passing of motor racing legend Bruce McLaren have taken place at the McLaren Group HQ in Woking.

In a private ceremony at the McLaren Technology Centre, Amanda McLaren unveiled a life-size statue of her father who was killed while testing a McLaren M8D Can-Am race car 50 years ago today.

When the New Zealander left the pits at Goodwood Circuit in West Sussex for the final time at a little after noon on 2 June 1970 he was just 32 years-old, but had already written his name into racing folklore.

uckland-born McLaren overcame adversity from a young age, with a childhood disease leaving him with a left leg shorter that the right, but that didn’t stop him inheriting the racing bug from his mechanic father, Les. The young Bruce McLaren entered his first race, a hillclimb, aged only 14, behind the wheel of a venerable Austin 7 Ulster prepared for him by his father in the family workshop. It began a meteoric rise for Bruce in his homeland, and by 20 he was runner up in the New Zealand Formula Two Championship.

His obvious potential prompted the New Zealand International Grand Prix Organisation to choose him as the first recipient of their ‘Driver to Europe’ scheme, which saw him move to England to race for the Cooper outfit. Bruce was still four weeks short of his 21st Birthday when he made his Grand Prix debut at the Nurburgring, finishing an impressive fifth. He became a full-time member of the Cooper factory F1 team the following year alongside a fellow antipodean, the Australian Jack Brabham who went on to win the title that year. When Bruce McLaren won the 1959 United States Grand Prix he became, at 22 years and 104 days, the youngest ever Grand Prix winner. He finished runner-up in 1960 as team-mate Brabham retained his title, but that would prove to be the zenith of Bruce’s World Championship achievements as he spent the next five years with the increasingly uncompetitive Cooper team. With a keen engineering eye, Bruce already had ambitions to run his own Grand Prix team, and having founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd in 1963 he took the plunge in 1966 and entered Formula One with cars for himself and fellow Kiwi Chris Amon. Fittingly, when the McLaren team achieved their first Grand Prix win at Spa in 1968, it was Bruce who was behind the wheel. Although he finished third in the Drivers’ World Championship the following year, that victory in Belgium was the fourth and final Grand Prix win for Bruce McLaren, whose undoubted ability deserved more visits to the top step of the podium.

His attentions were split between Grand Prix racing and sports car racing as he worked hard to build the Bruce McLaren brand. Bruce’s sports car racing pedigree was already evident, having won the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hour race alongside Amon in a Ford GT40, but he wanted to emulate the Blue Oval’s sports car dominance with a car bearing his own name. The North American Can-Am sports car series proved fertile ground for Bruce’s design and engineering prowess, with McLaren cars winning five of six races in 1967, four of six in 1968, and a clean sweep of all eleven races in the 1969 season.

As an exceptional engineering test driver, Bruce took a very hands-on approach to the development of new models, and this was to prove his undoing when he got behind the wheel of the new McLaren M8D on that fateful June day in 1970. When the rear bodywork came loose at speed, Bruce McLaren was powerless to combat the sudden loss of aerodynamic downforce and the car left the track, hitting a marshal’s post and killing its driver outright.

Six years earlier, in the book From the Cockpit, McLaren had written of the death of teammate Timmy Mayer, and no more fitting words could be found than if he had intended them for his own obituary. McLaren wrote, “The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more, and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.”
The team Bruce McLaren created, and which eventually evolved into the McLaren Group that exists today, has lived up to the ideals laid out by its founder, going on to become one the most dominant names in Formula One history. McLaren have been Formula One Constructors’ Champions on eight occasions, and the Drivers’ World Championship has been won twelve times by drivers at the wheel of a McLaren. In the five decades since Bruce McLaren’s death, McLaren cars have won a total of 182 Grand Prix, three Indianapolis 500s, and the Le Mans 24 Hour.

In addition to the bronze statue of created by renowned artist Paul Oz, the ceremony at McLaren’s Surrey base also saw 50 candles lit and placed around the McLaren M8D driven to the 1970 Can-Am title by Bruce’s compatriot Denny Hulme, sister car to the one in which to company founder was killed.

As she unveiled the bronze statue of her father, Amanda McLaren said, “June 2 is always an emotional date for us and that’s particularly true this year. Having ‘Dad’ looking out over McLaren is incredibly moving and I know that he would have been so very proud of the achievements made in his name.”